In the last few decades, mother organizations, such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and the Mothers of the Association of Families of Detained-Disappeared in Chili, organized around the role of motherhood as a reaction to the authoritarian regimes which wounded their lives in irretrievable ways. They have tried to attract the attention of the national and international public to shed light on the hidden violence by attempting to share their hidden wounds and demonstrating the fact that what had been invisible before had to be visible through their transformation from domestic mothers into "subversives". Turkey also became the host of several mothers' organizations which emerged in the last two decades, including Baris Anneleri (The Peace Mothers) -composed of the mothers of Kurdish guerrillas and Cumartesi Anneleri (The Saturday Mothers)- composed of the mothers of the Disappeared. These two organizations transformed the Turkish public sphere through employing the politically-informed neutrality of motherhood and its emotive language. The Peace Mothers has aimed at gaining national and international recognition/support in order to force the Turkish state to effect an acceptable solution to the Kurdish Question, while the Saturday Mothers has aimed to make state authorities account for their relatives' disappearance and to denounce human rights violations in Turkey. This paper analyzes the construction of motherhood as a form of political agency in the Turkish public sphere, with particular reference to the Peace Mothers and the Saturday Mothers as well as the texts that they have produced during their campaigns. Building on the press releases, texts and interviews delivered by the Mothers and in considering their demonstrations as performative texts, the paper attempts to trace the role of this specific textuality in the transformation of the language of ethnic, political and masculinized suffering into a language of maternal suffering. Furthermore, the paper explores various other questions such as: the position of the Mothers as bearers of connotations of death and life; the failure of citizenship rights in Turkey; the rise of human rights discourse in the process of accession to the European Union; the in/visibility and il/legibility of the state in the narratives of the Mothers; the crucial role of the Turkish nation-state in shaping the survival strategies and oppositional agency of marginalized bodies, as well as the ways in which overlapping power structures of gender, class, ethnicity, and geographic location limit "free" argumentation in the public sphere.